Consumers expect excellent mobile experiences everywhere they go — at home, at work, while they commute. To expand the reach of premium Wi-Fi performance to more people, Qualcomm Technologies is bringing its high-performance integrated 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi with MU-MIMO to the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 Mobile Platform. Until now this was only available in the Snapdragon 800 mobile platforms tier.
Devices that support 2x2 Wi-Fi have two antennas instead of one. With double the antennas, Snapdragon 660 and 800-series mobile platforms with this technology are engineered to provide up to twice the user throughput and a significant improvement in coverage, which is especially useful in homes and offices with brick and concrete walls. This 2x2 Wi-Fi technology also supports MU-MIMO and is engineered to boost the performance of crowded networks by allowing multiple devices to be served simultaneously.
Qualcomm Technologies worked with a leading Chinese OEM to test 2x2 Wi-Fi in a real-life scenario. For this reason, we set up a Wi-Fi network in a typical 100-square meter apartment in a busy, multi-story residential building in Shanghai, China. We found that devices with 2x2 Wi-Fi delivered double the throughput, eliminating dead spots in hard-to-reach areas of the apartment.
In addition to 2x2 Wi-Fi, the Snapdragon 660 is designed to support a slew of advanced Wi-Fi features, including LTE/Wi-Fi antenna-sharing technology, which offers OEMs the option to offer 2x2 performance using only one antenna. As the name suggests, this features allows both LTE and Wi-Fi systems to intelligently share a single antenna. This can help them to create thinner phones or pack in more features with the space saved.
The Snapdragon 660 mobile platform boasts Dual Band Simultaneous technology (DBS), which allows phones to use both 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz Wi-Fi bands simultaneously. This can lead to better performance and new use cases like using a smartphone as a Wi-Fi hub, and streaming internet content from your smartphone to a television and Wi-Fi enabled speakers. The 660 supports Bluetooth 5 as well, which can double the amount of data that devices can transfer compared to the previous generation.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 mobile platform is available now. Get full specs and download the product brief.
Qualcomm Snapdragon is a product of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.
